After two years, it's pretty clear that the west is not capable of doing anything of the sort. All the west managed to achieve was to ensure that hundreds of thousands of people died, and that Ukraine lost large parts of its territory in the process. We now have admissions from Ukrainian negotiators that a peace deal was close to being reached last March before the west sabotaged it.
That would have been a peace deal that would have meant further hostilities down the line a few years later.
The main problem with the west is that they believe they can make a deal with Russia that they are going to honor. The truth is that Russia honors the deals when it suits them and breaks them the moment it's useful. Any negotiation is and will always be seen as weakness from the Russian side.
As their propagandist said "We are Russian. We want the world. All of it if possible."
The actual truth is that it's NATO that's been constantly expanding towards Russia. It's also NATO that's been invading and destroying countries since the end of USSR. Syria, Libya, and Yugoslavia being some prominent examples.
Meanwhile, Russia tried to resolve this situation diplomatically since 2008 with Minsk agreements that western leaders now openly admit were a delaying tactic by the west.
Finally, section IX of Ukraine’s 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty states the following:
The whole legal basis for the existence of state of Ukraine is predicated on Ukraine staying neutral and not joining military blocs. Ukraine broke the very basis of this agreement when it tried to join NATO.
Now, thanks to western "help", Ukraine will lose far more territory than it would have if the deal was done last year, and it may even cease to exist as a state. I can't wait for you to explain how this actually helps people of Ukraine.
I think Americans in general don't see it as a difficult choice to support Ukraine
Politicians find it difficult because Republicans are pro-russian, and both parties are heavily aligned with Israel. So Ukraines the only one really seeing any push back.
I was about to call you neive but then I thought, maybe your right. What if the politicians arnt pro Russia, they are just pro money.
So they are taking bribes from anyone, be it Russia, isis, pharmaceutical companies or big oil. We just catch them out as Russia are the worst right now
I think that's worse than them "just" being pro Russia 😔
Of course politicians are pro-money. You don't get to be a politician in a capitalist country without being pro-money, wealthy, and well connected to others who are wealthy.
Bribery is in most cases legal in the US. It's called lobbying, or campaign donations, or the revolving door between public service and private industry. It's also an unsolvable problem given the current economic paradigm. The capitalist class will determine government policy in one way or another, as the government is designed to protect the interests of the capitalist class. The will of the working people is completely irrelevant.
Russian money, insofar as it does exist in US politics (there's astonishingly little of it compared to other sources) is drawn to attention by a media that is owned by the same companies and people that are bribing in a much larger way. They call attention to the few thousand dollars a Russian immigrant may or may not have donated to the NRA or a Republican candidate to distract from the billions of dollars Wall Street spends on candidates and kickbacks to make sure they're the ones who control US economic, financial, and foreign policy. It's easy to call attention to Russian money because the same media has created an environment in which anything Russian is pure evil, so people don't even question the content of the story being told. This has its roots in Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda, which has been dug up and repackaged to use against a post-2008 "non-aligned" modern Russia.
I never said these two things were related nor mutually exclusive.
I'll be more explicit.
Russiagate was a work of fantasy telling a story about a supposed Manchurian candidate, rather than admitting that the Democratic campaign made mistakes and that Trump spoke to genuine issues the US population has (of course without solutions but that's not the point here).
Bribes Campaign donations and favours are given to candidates and office holders all the time by interest groups, companies, and wealthy individuals. A donation by JP Morgan or a Koch has nothing to do with the Russiagate fairytale.
